PREPENT5772 DAY THIRTY NINE WHAT DID YOU LEARN?

39/40

A. asked me an excellent question this morning: 'did you learn anything from your PREPENT process'?

I had to pause.

I guess that if one takes 40 days to explore 40 ways in which more focus can be be found, clarity of intention is cultivated and a year is launched into being with attention to detail - learning SHOULD happen, in, at least some way. Otherwise, it's just mental masturbation. But the learning only happens when we really stop to listen to what we now know, or feel, and how it may be different, even with  changes as subtle as smiles.

With one more day to go, with careful time for closure, this is the time to ask this question - as one asks a kid who comes back from school: what did you learn today?

So during this year's PREPENT journey:

I learned to take things slower, much slower, lower expectations, reduce speed, esp. with romance. patience. 

I learned, yet again, to be less dependent on love/feedback from others and feel good about my own achievements. self love.

And I learned that there is a pattern to my failures, becoming more obvious as I take the time to analyze each painful fragment of collapse.  Walk in another street, avoid the same pitfalls. 

And I learned that I can survive heartache.  have faith. 

None of these are new lessons yet each of them is back for more. I guess it's what I have to learn this year, and what is on my plate as I begin this year of new beginning and intentions. 

I know that there are some of you are reading this - have been reading this - and THANK YOU to those of you who wrote, responded, shared intimate learning and thoughts. I invite you to wrap it with me - with a list of three things you learned from this season of atonement, these 40 days of focus-finding and perfection of self. 

Every thing I need to know I already learned in kindergarten, and even then, when I came home, it was hard to answer the question 'what did you learn today'. 

But I'm not a toddler anymore. And I take responsibility for my own good time, and my own hard earned learning, never, I hope, taken for granted. 

what did I learn and how can this make me live better?

One day to go.